Philip Jose Farmer - WOT 2 - The Gates of Creation

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THE GATES OF CREATION
Philip Jose Farmer
I
Thousands of years ago, the lords had used drugs, electron-ics, hypnotism, and psychotechniques to
do without sleep. Their bod-ies stayed fresh and vigorous, their eyes unclouded, for days and
nights, for months. But their minds eventually crumbled. Halluci-nations, unbounded anger, and an
unreasonable sense of doom gripped them. Some went mad forever and had to be killed or
im-prisoned.
It was then that the Lords found that even they, makers of uni-verses, owners of a science that
put them only one step below the gods, must dream. The unconscious mind, denied communication with
the sleeping conscious, revolted. Its weapon was madness, with which it toppled the pillars of
reason.
So, all Lords now slept and dreamed.
Robert Wolff, once called Jadawin, Lord of the Planet of Many Levels, of a world that was
constructed like a Tower of Babylon, dreamed.
He dreamed that a six-pointed star had drifted through a window into his bedroom. Whirling, it
hung in the air above the foot of his bed. It was a pandoogaluz, one of the ancient symbols of the
religion in which the Lords no longer believed. Wolff, who tended to think mostly in English,
thought of it as a hexaculum. It was a six-sided star, its center glowing white, each of its
facets flashing a ray, a scar-let, an orange, an azure, a purple, a black, and a yellow. The
hex-aculum pulsed like the heart of the sun, and the rays javelined out, raking his eyelids
lightly. The beams scratched the skin as a house cat might extend a claw to wake its sleeping
master with the tiniest sting.
"What do you want?" Wolff said, and knew he was dreaming. The hexaculum was a danger; even the
shadows that formed between its beams were thick with evil. And he knew that the hexaculum had
been sent by his father, Urizen, whom he had not seen for two thou-sand years. "Jadawin!"
The voice was silent, the words formed by the six rays, which now bent and coiled and writhed like
snakes of fire. The letters into which they shaped themselves were of the ancient alphabet, the
original writing of the Lords. He saw them glowing before him, yet he under-stood them not so much
through the eye as through a voice that spoke deep within him. It was as if the colors reached
into the center of his mind and evoked a long-dead voice. The voice was deep, so deep it vibrated
his innermost being, whirled it, and threatened to bend it into nightmare figures that would
forever keep their shape.
"Wake up, Jadawin!" his father's voice said. By these words, Wolff knew that the flashing-rayed
hexaculum was not only in his mind but existed in reality. His eyes opened, and he stared up at
the concave ceiling, self-luminous with a soft and shifting light, veined with red, black, yellow,
and green. He put out his left hand to touch Chryseis, his wife, and found that her side of the
bed was empty.
At this, he sat upright and looked to left and right and saw that she was not in the room. He
called, "Chryseis!" Then he saw the glit-tering pulsing six-rayed object that hung six feet above
the edge of his bed. Out of it came, in sound, not fire, his father's voice.
"Jadawin, my son, my enemy! Do not look for the lesser being you have honored by making your mate.
She is gone and will not be back."
Wolff stood up and then sprang out of bed. How had this thing gotten into his supposedly
impregnable castle? Long before it had reached the bedroom in the center of the castle, alarms
should have wakened him, massive doors should have slid shut throughout the enormous building,
laser beams should have been triggered in the many halls, ready to cut down intruders, the hundred
different traps should have been set. The hexaculum should have been shattered, slashed, burned,
exploded, crushed, drowned.
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But not a single light shone on the great wall across the room, the wall that seemed only an
arabesqued decoration but was the alarm and control diagram-panel of the castle. It glimmered
quietly as if an uninvited guest were not within a million miles.
The voice of Urizen, his father, laughed, and said, "You did not think you could keep the Lord of
Lords out with your puny weapons, did you? Jadawin, I could kill you now where you stand gaping so
foolishly, so pale and quivering and filmed in sweat."
"Chryseis!" Wolff cried out again.
"Chryseis is gone. She is no longer safe in your bed and in your universe. She has been taken as
quickly and as silently as a thief steals a jewel."
"What do you want, Father?" Wolff asked.
"I want you to come after her. Try to get her back."
Wolff bellowed, leaped up onto the bed, and launched himself over its edge at the hexaculum. For
that moment, he forgot all reason and caution, which had told him that the object could be fatal.
His hands gripped the many-colored glowing thing. They closed on air and came together and he was
standing on the floor, looking up above him at the space where the hexaculum had been. Even as his
hands touched the area filled by the starred polyhedron, it had vanished.
So, perhaps, it had not been physical. Perhaps it had after all been a projection stirred in him
by some means.
He did not believe so. It was a configuration of energies, of fields momentarily held together and
transmitted from some remote place. The projector might be in the universe next door or it might
be a million universes away. The distance did not matter. What did matter was that Urizen had
penetrated the walls of Wolff's personal world. And he had spirited Chryseis away.
Wolff did not expect any more word from his father. Urizen had not indicated where he had taken
Chryseis, how Wolff was to find her, or what would be done to Chryseis. Yet Wolff knew what he had
to do. Somehow, he would have to locate the hidden self-enclosed cosmos of his father. Then he
would have to find the gate that would give entrance to the pocket universe. At the same time that
he got ac-cess, he would have to detect and avoid the traps set for him by Urizen. If he succeeded
in doing this-and the probabilities were very low-he would have to get to Urizen and kill him.
Only thus could he rescue Chryseis.
This was the multimillennia-old pattern of the game played among the Lords. Wolff himself, as
Jadawin, the seventh son of Urizen, had survived 10,000 years of the deadly amusement. But he had
managed to do so largely by being content with staying in his own universe. Unlike many of the
Lords, he had not grown tired of the world he had created. He had enjoyed it-although it had been
a cruel enjoy-ment, he had to admit now. Not only had he exploited the natives of his world for
his own purposes, he had set up defenses that had snared more than one Lord-male and female, some
his own brothers and sisters-and the trapped ones had died slowly and horribly. Wolff felt
contrition for what he had done to the inhabitants of his planet. For the Lords he had killed and
tortured, he suffered no guilt. They knew what they were doing when they came into his world, and
if they had beaten his defenses, they would have given him a painful time before he died.
Then Lord Vannax had succeeded in hurling him into the universe of Earth, although at the cost of
being taken along with Jadawin. A third Lord, Arwoor, had moved in to possess Jadawin's world.
Jadawin's memory of his former life had been repressed by the shock of dispossession, of being
cast weaponless into an alien uni-verse and without the means to return to his own world; Jadawin
had become a blank, a tabula rasa. Adopted by a Kentuckian named Wolff, the amnesiac Jadawin had
taken the name of Robert Wolff. Not until he was sixty-six years old did he discover what had
hap-pened before the time that he had stumbled down a Kentucky moun-tain. He had retired from a
lifetime of teaching Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to the Phoenix area of Arizona. And there, while
looking through a newly built house for sale, he had begun the series of ad-ventures that took him
through a "gate" back into the universe he had created and had ruled as Lord for 10,000 years.
There he had fought his way up from the lowest level of the monoplanet, an Earth-sized Tower of
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Babylon, to the palace-castle of Lord Arwoor. There he had met and fallen in love with Chryseis,
one of his own semicreations. And he had become the Lord again, but not the same Lord as the one
who had left it. He had become human.
His tears, loosed by his anguish at the loss of Chryseis and the ter-ror of what could happen to
her, were proof of his humanity. No Lord shed tears over another living being, although it was
said that Urizen had cried with joy when he had trapped two of his sons some thousands of years
ago.
No time-waster, Wolff set about doing what had to be done. First, he must make sure that someone
occupied the castle while he was gone. He did not want to repeat what had happened the last time
he had left this world. On returning, he had found another Lord in his place. Now there was only
one man who was capable of filling his shoes and whom he could trust. That was Kickaha (born Paul
Janus Finnegan in Terre Haute, Indiana, Earth). It was Kickaha who had given him the horn that had
enabled him to get back into this world.
Kickaha had given him the indispensable help that had permitted him to regain his Lordship.
The horn!
With that, he would be able to track down Urizen's world and gain entrance to it! He strode across
the chrysoprase floor to the wall and swung down a section of the wall, carved in the semblance of
a giant eagless of this planet. He stopped and gasped with shock. The hiding place no longer had a
horn to hide. The hollowed out part in which the horn had lain was empty.
So, Urizen had not only taken Chryseis but he had stolen the an-cient Horn of Shambarimen.
So be it. Wolff would weep over Chryseis but he would spend no time in useless mourning for an
artifact, no matter how treasured.
He walked swiftly through the halls, noting that none of the alarms were triggered. All slept as
if this were just another day in the quiet but happy times since Wolff had regained possession of
the pal-ace on top of the world. He could not help shivering. He had always feared his father. Now
that he had such evidence of his father's vast powers, he dreaded him even more. But he did not
fear to go after him. He would track him down and kill him or die trying.
In one of the colossal control rooms, he seated himself before a pagoda-shaped console. He set a
control which would automatically bring him, in sequence, views of all the places on this planet
where he had set videos. There were ten thousand of these on each of the four lower levels,
disguised as rocks or trees. They had been placed to allow him to see what was happening in
various key areas. For two hours he sat while the screen flashed views. Then, knowing that he
could be there for several days, he plugged in the eidolon of Kickaha and left the viewer. Now, if
Kickaha were seen, the screen would lock on the scene and an alarm would notify Wolff.
He placed ten more consoles in operation. These automatically began to scan throughout the cosmos
of the "parallel" universes to detect and identify them. The records were seventy years old, so it
was to be presumed that universes created since then would swell the known number of one thousand
and eight. It was these that Wolff was interested in. Urizen no longer lived in the original one
of Gardazrintah, where Wolff had been raised with many of his brothers, sisters, and cousins. In
fact, Urizen, who grew tired of entire worlds as swiftly as a spoiled child became weary with new
toys, had moved three tunes since leaving Gardazrintah. And the chances were that he was now in a
fourth and this last one had to be identified and pene-trated.
Even when all had been recorded, he could not be sure that his fa-ther's universe was located. If
a universe were entirely sealed off, it was undetectable. A universe could be found only through
the "gates," each of which gave off a unique frequency. If Urizen wanted to make it really
difficult for Wolff to find him, he could set up an on-off-on gate. This would open at regular
intervals or at random times, depending upon Urizen's choice. And if it happened not to open at
the time that Wolff's scanner was searching that "parallel corridor," it would not be detected. As
far as the scanners were con-cerned, that area would be an "empty" one.
However, Urizen wanted him to come after him and so should not make it too difficult or impossible
for him to do so.
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Lords must eat. Wolff had a light breakfast served by a talos, one of the half-protein robots,
looking like knights in armor, of which he had over a thousand. Then he shaved and showered in a
room carved out of a single emerald. Afterwards, he clothed himself. He wore cor-duroy shoes,
tight-fitting corduroy trousers, a corduroy short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck but with a
collar that curved up in back, a broad belt of mammoth leather, and a golden chain around his
neck. From the chain hung a red jade image of Shambarimen, given to him by the great artist and
artificer of the Lords, when he, Wolff, had been a boy of ten. The red of the jade was the only
bright color of his garments, the rest being a thrush-brown. When in the castle, he dressed simply
or not at all. Only during the rare occasions when he went down to the lower levels for state
ceremonies did he dress in the magnificent robes and complex hat of a Lord. In most of his
descents, he went incognito, clad in the garments or nongarments of the local natives.
He left the walls of the castle to go out onto one of the hundreds of great balcony-gardens. There
was an Eye sitting in a tree, a raven large as a bald eagle. He was one of the few survivors of
the on-slaught on the castle when Wolff had taken this world back from Ar-woor. Now that Arwoor
was dead, the ravens had transferred their loyalty to Wolff.
Wolff told the raven that he was to fly out and look for Kickaha. He would inform other Eyes of
the Lord of his mission and also tell the eagles of Podarge. They must inform Kickaha that he was
wanted at once. If Kickaha did get their message and came to the castle, only to find Wolff gone,
he was to remain there as Lord pro tem. If, after a reasonable interval, Wolff did not return,
Kickaha could then do whatever he wanted.
He knew that Kickaha would come after him and that it was no use forbidding him to do so.
The raven flew off, happy to have a mission. Wolff went back into the castle. The viewers were
still searching, without success, for Kickaha. But the gate-finders, needing only microseconds to
scan and identify, had gone through all the universes and were already on their sixth sweep. He
allowed them to continue on the chance that some gates might be intermittent and the search scan
and gate on-state had not coincided. The results of the first five searches were on paper, printed
in the classical ideographs of the ancient language.
There were thirty-five new universes. Of these, only one had a sin-gle gate.
Wolff had the spectral image of this placed upon a screen. It was a six-pointed star with the
center red instead of white as he had seen it. Red for danger.
As plainly as if Urizen had told him, he knew that this was the gate to Urizen's world. Here I am.
Come and get me-if you dare.
He visualized his father's face, the handsome falcon features with large eyes like wet black
diamonds. Lords were ageless, their bodies held in the physiological grip of the first twenty-five
years of life. But emotions were stronger even than the science of the Lords-working with their
ally, time, they slashed away at the rocks of flesh. And the last time he had seen his father, he
had seen the lines of hate. God alone knew how deep they were now, since it was evident that
Urizen had not ceased to hate.
As Jadawin, Wolff had returned his father's enmity. But he had not been like so many of his
brothers and sisters in trying to kill him. Wolff had just not wanted to have anything at all to
do with him. Now, he loathed him because of what he had done to innocent Chryseis. Now, he meant
to slay him.
The fabrication of a gate which would match the frequency-image of the hexaculum-entrance to
Urizen's world was automatic. Even so, it took twenty-two hours for the machines to finish the
device. By then, the planetary viewers had all reported in. Kickaha was not in their line of
sight. This did not mean that the elusive fellow was not on the planet. He could be just outside
the scope of the viewers or he could be a hundred thousand places elsewhere. The planet had even
more land area than Earth, and the viewers covered only a tiny part of it. Thus, it might be a
long long time before Kickaha was appre-hended.
Wolff decided not to waste any time. The second the matching hexaculum was finished, he went into
action. He ate a light meal and drank water, since he did not know how long he might have to do
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without either once he stepped through the gate. He armed himself with a beamer, a knife, a bow,
and a quiverful of arrows. The primi-tive weapons might seem curious arms to take along in view of
the highly technological death-dispensers he would have to face. But it was one of the ironies of
the Lords' technology that the set-ups in which they operated sometimes permitted such weapons to
be effec-tive.
Actually, he did not expect to be able to use any of his arms. He knew too well the many types of
traps the Lords had used.
"And now," Wolff said, "it must be done. There is no use waiting any longer."
He walked into the narrow space inside the matching hexaculum. Wind whistled and tore at him.
Blackness. A sense as of great hands gripping him. All in a dizzying flash.
He was standing upon grass, giant fronds at a distance from him, a blue sea close by, a red sky
above, hugging the island and the rim of the sea. There was light from every quarter of the
heavens and no sun. His clothes were still upon his body, although he had felt as if they were
being ripped off when he had gone through the gate. More-over, his weapons were still with him.
Certainly, this was not the interior of Urizen's stronghold. Or, if it were, it was the most
unconventional dwelling-place of a Lord that he had ever seen.
He turned to see the hexaculum which had received him. It was not there. Instead, a tall wide
hexagon of purplish metal rose from a broad flat boulder. He remembered now that something had
pushed him out through it and that he had had to take several steps to keep from falling. The
energy that had shoved him had caused him to pass out of it and a few paces from the boulder.
Urizen had set another gate within his hexaculum and had shunted him off to this place, wherever
it was. Why Urizen had done so would become apparent quickly enough.
Wolff knew what would happen if he tried to walk back through the gate. Nevertheless, not being
one to take things for granted, he did attempt it. With ease, he stepped out on the other side
upon the boulder.
It was a one-way gate, just as he had expected.
Somebody coughed behind him, and he whirled, his beamer ready.
II
THE LAND ENDED ABRUPTLY AGAINST THE SEA WITH NO INTERVENING beach. The animal had just emerged
from the sea and was only a few feet from him. It squatted like a toad on huge webbed feet, its
colum-nar legs folded as if they were boneless. The torso was humanoid and sheathed in fat, with a
belly that protruded like that of a Thanks-giving goose. The neck was long and supple. At its end
was a human head, but the nose was flat and had long narrow nostrils. Tendrils of red flesh
sprouted out around the mouth. The eyes were very large and moss-green. There were no ears. The
pate was covered, like the face and body, with a dark-blue oily fur.
"Jadawin!" the creature said. It spoke in the ancient language of the Lords. "Jadawin! Don't kill
me! Don't you know me?"
Wolff was shocked but not so much that he forgot to look behind him. This creature could be trying
to distract him.
"Jadawin! Don't you recognize your own brother!"
Wolff did not know him. The frog-seal body, lack of ears, blue fur, and squashed long-slitted nose
made identification too difficult. And there was Time. If he had really called this thing brother,
it must have been millennia ago.
That voice. It dug away at the layers of dusty memory, like a dog after an old bone. It scraped
away level after level, it...
He shook his head and glanced behind him and at the feathery vegetation. "Who are you?" he asked.
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The creature whined, and by this he knew that his brother-if it were his brother-must have been
imprisoned in that body for a long long time. No Lord whined.
"Are you going to deny me? Are you like the others? They'd have nothing to do with me. They mocked
at me, they spat upon me, they drove me away with kicks and laughs. They said. . ."
It clapped its flippers together and twisted its face and large tears ran from the moss-green eyes
and down the blue cheeks. "Oh, Jadawin, don't be like the rest! You were always my favorite, my
be-loved! Don't be cruel like them!"
The others, Wolff thought. There had been others. How long ago?
Impatiently, he said, "Let's not play games-whoever you are. Your name!"
The creature rose on its boneless legs, muscles raising the fat that coated them, and took a step
forward. Wolff did not back away, but he held the beamer steady. "That's far enough. Your name."
The creature stopped, but its tears kept on flowing. "You are as bad as the others. You think of
nobody but yourself; you don't care what's happened to me. Doesn't my suffering and loneliness and
agonies all this time-oh, this immeasurable time-touch you at all?"
"It might if I knew who you were," Wolff said. "And what's hap-pened to you."
"Oh, Lord of the Lords! My own brother!"
It advanced another giant splayfoot, the wetness squishing from out under the webs. It held out a
flipper as if beseeching a tender hand. Then it stopped, and the eyes flicked at a spot just to
one side of Wolff. He jumped to his left and whirled, the beamer pointing to cover both the
creature and whoever might have been behind him. There was no one.
And, as the thing had planned, it leaped for Wolff at the same time that Wolff jumped and turned.
Its legs uncoiled like a catapult released and shot it forward. If Wolff had only turned, he would
have been knocked down. Standing to one side, he escaped all but the tip of the thing's right
flipper. Even that, striking his left shoulder and arm, was enough to send him staggering numbly
to one side, making him drop the beamer. Wolff was enormously solid and pow-erful himself, with
muscles and nerve impulses raised to twice their natural strength and speed by the Lords' science.
If he had been a normal Earthman, he would have been crippled forever in his arm, and he would not
have been able to escape the second leap of the creature.
Squalling with fury and disappointment, it landed on the spot where Wolff had been, sank on its
legs as if they were springs, spun, and launched itself at Wolff again. All this was done with
such swift-ness that the creature looked as if it were an actor in a speeded-up film.
Wolff had succeeded in regaining his balance. He jumped.out for the beamer. The shadow of the
creature passed over him; its shriek-ing was so loud it seemed as if its lips were pressed against
his ear. Then he had the beamer in his hands, had rolled over and over, and was up on his feet. By
then the thing had propelled itself again to-wards him. Wolff reversed the beamer, and using his
right hand, brought the light but practically indestructible metal stock down on top of the
creature's head. The impact of the huge body hurled him backward; he rolled away. The sea-thing
was lying motionless on its face, blood welling from its seal-like scalp.
Hands clapped, and he turned to see two human beings thirty yards away inland, under the shadow of
a frond. They were male and female, dressed in the magnificent clothes of Lords. They walked
to-wards him, their hands empty of weapons. Their only arms were swords in crude leather, or fish-
skin, scabbards. Despite this seeming powerlessness, Wolff did not relax his guard. When they had
ap-proached within twenty yards of him, he told them to stop. The crea-ture groaned and moved its
head but made no effort to sit up. Wolff moved away from it to be outside its range of leap.
"Jadawin!" the woman called. She had a lovely contralto voice which stirred his heart and his
memory. Although he had not seen her in five hundred or more years, he knew her then.
"Vala!" he said. "What are you doing here?" The question was rhetorical; he knew she must have
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also been trapped by their father. And now he recognized the man. He was Rintrah, one of his
brothers. Vala, his sister, and Rintrah, his brother, had fallen into the same snare.
Vala smiled at him, and his heart sprang again. She was of all women he had known the most
beautiful, with two exceptions. His lovely Chryseis and his other sister, Anana the Bright,
surpassed her. But he had never loved Anana as he had Vala. Just as he had never hated Anana as he
had Vala.
Vala applauded again, and said, "Well done, Jadawin! You have lost none of your skill or wits.
That thing is dangerous, even if detest-able. It cringes and whines and tries to gain your trust,
and then, bang! It's at your throat! It almost killed Rintrah when he first came here and would
have if I had not struck it unconscious with a rock. So, you see, I, too, have dealt with it."
"And why did you not kill it then?" Wolff said.
Rintrah smiled and said, "Don't you know your own little brother, Jadawin? That creature is your
beloved, your cute little Theotormon."
Wolff said, "God! Theotormon! Who did this to him?"
Neither of the two answered, nor was an answer needed. This was Urizen's world; only he could have
refashioned their brother thus.
Theotormon groaned and sat up. One flipper placed over the bloody spot on his head, he rocked back
and forth and moaned. His lichen-green eyes glared at Wolff, and he silently mouthed vitupera-tion
he did not dare voice.
Wolff said, "You're not trying to tell me you spared his life be-cause of fraternal sentiment? I
know you better than that."
Vala laughed and said, "Of course not! I thought he could be used later on. He knows this little
planet well, since he has been here such a long long time. He is a coward, brother Jadawin. He did
not have the courage to test his life in the maze of Urizen; he stayed upon this island and became
as one of the degenerate natives. Our father tired of waiting for him to summon up a nonexistent
manhood. To punish him for his lack of bravery, he caught him and took him off to his stronghold,
Appirmatzum. There he reshaped him, made him into this disgusting sea-thing. Even then, Theotormon
did not dare to go through the gates into Urizen's palace. He stayed here and lived as a hermit,
hating and despising himself, hating all other living beings, especially Lords.
"He lives upon the fruit of the islands, the birds and fish and other sea-things he can catch. He
eats them raw, and he kills the natives and eats them when he gets a chance. Not that they don't
deserve their fate. They are the sons and daughters of other Lords who, like Theotormon, were
craven. They lived out their miserable lives upon this planet, had babies, raised these, and then
died.
"Urizen did to them as he did to Theotormon. He took them to Appirmatzum, made them into loathsome
shapes, and brought them back here. Our father thought that surely the monstering of them would
make them hate him so much they would then test the trap-door planets, try to get into
Appirmatzum, and revenge themselves. But they were cowards all. They preferred to live on, even in
their stomach-turning metamorphosis, rather than die as true Lords."
Wolff said, "I have much to learn about this little arrangement of our father. But how do I know
that I can trust you?"
Again Vala laughed. "All of us who have fallen into Urizen's traps are upon this island. Most of
us have been here only a few weeks, al-though Luvah has been here for half a year."
"Who are the others?"
"Some of your brothers and cousins. Besides Rintrah and Luvah, there are two other brothers, Enion
and Ariston. And your cousins Tharmas and Palamabron."
She laughed merrily and pointed at the red sky and said, "All, all snared by our father! All
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gathered together again after a heartrending absence of millennia. A happy family reunion such as
mortals could not imagine."
"I can imagine," Wolff said. "You still have not answered my question about trust."
"We have all sworn to a common-front truce," Rintrah said. "We need each other, so we must put
aside our natural enmity and work together. Only thus will it be possible to defeat Urizen."
"There hasn't been a common-front truce for as long as I can remember," Wolff said. "I remember
Mother telling me that there had been one once, four thousand years before I was born, when the
Black Sellers threatened the Lords. Urizen has performed two mira-cles. He has trapped eight Lords
all at once, and he has forced a truce. May this be his downfall."
Wolff then said that he would swear to the truce. By the name of the Father of all Lords, the
great Eponym Los, he swore to observe all the rules of the peace-agreement until such time as all
agreed to abandon it or all were dead but one. He knew even as he took the oath that the others
could not be relied upon not to betray him. He knew that Rintrah and Vala were aware of this and
trusted him no more than he did them. But at least they would all be working to-gether for a
while. And it was not likely that any would lightly break truce. Only when a great opportunity and
strong likelihood of escap-ing punishment coincided would any do so.
Theotormon whined, "Jadawin. My own brother. My favorite brother, he who said he would always love
me and protect me. You are like the others. You want to hurt me, to kill me. Your own little
brother."
Vala spat at him and said, "You filthy craven beast! You are no Lord nor brother of ours. Why do
you not dive to the deeps and there drown yourself, take your fearfulness and treachery out of our
sight and the sight of all beings that breathe air? Let the fish feed upon your fat carcass,
though even they may vomit you forth."
Crouching, extending a flipper, Theotormon shuffled towards Wolff. "Jadawin. You don't know how
I've suffered. Is there no pity in you for me? I always thought you, at least, had what these
others lacked. You had a warm heart, a compassion, that these soulless monsters lacked."
"You tried to kill me," Wolff said. "And you would try again if you thought you had a good chance
of doing it."
"No, no," Theotormon said, attempting to smile. "You misun-derstood me entirely. I thought you
would hate me because I loved even a base life more than I did a death as a Lord. I wanted to take
your weapons away so you couldn't hurt me. Then I would have ex-plained what had happened to me,
how I came to be this way. You would have understood then. You would have pitied me and loved me
as you did when you were a boy in the palace of our father and I was your infant brother. That is
all I wanted to do, explain to you and be loved again, not hated. I meant you no harm. By the name
of Los, I swear it."
"I will see you later," Wolff said. "Now, for the present, be gone."
Theotormon walked away spraddle-legged. When he had reached the edge of the island, he turned and
shouted obscenities and abuse at Wolff. Wolff raised his beamer, although he meant only to scare
Theotormon. The thing squawked and leaped like a giant frog out over the water, his rubbery legs
and webbed toes trailing behind him. He went into the water and did not come up again. Wolff asked
Vala how long he could stay under the surface.
"I do not know. Perhaps half an hour. But I doubt that he is hold-ing his breath. He is probably
in one of the caverns that exist in the roots and bladders that form the base of this island."
She said that they must go to meet the others. While they walked through the frond-forest, she
explained the physical facts of this world, as far as she knew them.
"You must have noticed how close the horizon is. This planet has a diameter of about 2170 miles."
(About the size of Earth's moon, Wolff thought.) "Yet the gravity is only a little less than that
of our home-planet." (Not much stronger than Earth's, Wolff thought.)
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"The gravity fades off abruptly above the atmosphere," she said, "and extends weakly through this
universe. All the other planets have similar fields."
Wolff did not wonder at this. The Lords could do things with fields and gravitons that the
terrestrials had never dreamed of as yet
"This planet is entirely covered with water."
"What about this island?" he said.
"It floats. Its origin is a plant which grows on the bottom of the sea. When it's half-grown, its
bladder starts to fill with gas, produced by a bacterium. It unroots itself and floats to the
surface. There it ex-tends roots or filaments, which meet with the filaments of others of its
kind. Eventually, there's a solid mass of such plants. The upper part of the plant dies off, while
the lower part continues to grow. The decaying upper part forms a soil. Birds add their excrement
to it. They come to new islands from old islands, and bring seeds in their droppings. These
produce the fronds you see and the other vegeta-tion." She pointed at a clump of bamboo-like
plants.
He asked, "Where did those rocks come from?"
There were several whitish boulders, with a diameter of about twelve feet, beyond the bamboos.
"The gas bladder plants that form islands are only one of perhaps several thousand species.
There's a type that attaches itself to sea-bottom rocks and that carries the rock to the surface
when they're buoyant enough. The natives bring them in and place them on the is-lands if they're
not too big. The white ones attract the garzhoo bird for some reason, and the natives kill the
garzhoo or domesticate it."
"What about the drinking water?"
"It's a fresh-water ocean."
Wolff, glancing through a break in the wilderness of purplish, yellow-streaked fronds and waist-
high berry-burdened bushes, saw a tremendous black arc appear on the horizon. In sixty seconds, it
had become a sphere and was climbing above the horizon.
"Our moon," she said. "Here, things are reversed. There is no sun; the light comes from the sky.
So the moon provides night or ab-sence of light. It is a pale sort of night, but better than none.
"Later, you will see the planet of Appirmatzum. It is in the center of this universe, and around
it the five secondary planets revolve. You will see them, too, all black and sky-filling like our
moon."
Wolff asked how she knew so much about the structure of Urizen's world. She answered that
Theotormon had given the information, though not willingly. He had learned much while a prisoner
of Urizen. He had not wanted to part with the information, since he was a surly and selfish beast.
But when his brothers, cousins, and sister had caught him, they had forced him to talk.
"Most of the scars are healed up," she said. She laughed.
Wolff wondered if Theotormon did not have good reasons after all for wanting to kill them. And he
wondered how much of her story of their dealings with him was true. He would have to have a talk
with Theotormon some tune, at a safe distance from him, of course.
Vala stopped talking and seized Wolff's arm. He started to jerk away, thinking that she meant to
try some trick. But she was looking upwards with alarm and so was Rintrah.
III
THE FRONDS, SIXTY FEET HIGH, HAD HIDDEN THE OBJECT IN THE SKY. Now he saw a mass at least a
quarter-mile wide, fifty feet thick, and almost a mile long floating fifty feet in the air. It was
drifting with the wind, which came from an unknown quarter of the compass. In this world without
sun, north, south, east, and west meant nothing.
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"What is that?" he said.
"An island that floats in the air. Hurry. We have to get to the vil-lage before the attack
starts."
Wolff set off after the others. From time to tune, he looked up through the fronds at the
aeronesus. It was descending rather swiftly at the opposite end of the island. He caught up with
Vala and asked her how the floater could be navigated. She replied that its inhabit-ants used
valves in the giant bladders to release their hydrogen. This procedure required almost all the
natives, since each bladder-valve was operated by hand. During a descent, they would all be
occupied with the navigation.
"How do they steer it?"
"The bladders have vents. When the abutal want the island to go in one direction, they release gas
from banks of bladders on the side opposite to that in which they want to go. They don't get much
power thrust, but they're very skillful. Even so, they have to contend with the winds and don't
always maneuver effectively. We've been at-tacked twice before by the abutal, and both times they
missed our is-land. They'll drop sea-anchors-big stones on the ends of cables-to slow them down.
The first attackers settled down close to our island instead of just above it and had to content
themselves with an attack by sea. They failed."
She stopped, then said, "Oh, no! These must be the Ilmawir. Los help us."
At first, Wolff thought that the fifty craft that had launched from the floater were small
airplanes. Then, as they circled to land against the wind, he saw that they were gliders. The
wings, fifty feet long, were of some pale shimmering stuff and scalloped on the edges. A painted
image of an eye with crossed swords above it was on the un-derside of each wing. The fuselage was
an uncovered framework, and its structure and the rudder and ailerons were painted scarlet. The
pilot sat in a wickerwork basket just forward of the monowings. The nose of the craft was rounded
and had a long horn projecting to a length of about twenty feet in front of it. Like the horn of a
narwhal, Wolff thought. As he later found out, the horns were taken from a giant fish.
A glider passed above them on a path which would make it land ahead of them. Wolff got a glimpse
of the pilot. His red hair stood at least a foot high; the hair shone with some fixative oil. His
face was painted like a red Indian's with red and green circles, and black chevrons ran down his
neck and across his shoulders.
"The village is about a half-mile from here," Vala said. "On the extreme end of the island."
Wolff wondered why she was so concerned. What did a Lord care what happened to others? She
explained that If the Ilmawir made a successful landing, they would kill every human being on the
island. They would then plant some of their surplus people as a colony.
The island was not entirely flat. There were rises here and there, formed by the uneven growth of
the bladders. Wolff climbed to the top of one and looked over the fronds. The abuta was down to
fifty feet now, settling slowly and headed directly for the village. This was a group of about one
hundred beehive-shaped huts, built of fronds. A wall twenty feet high surrounded the village. It
looked as if it were constructed of stones, bamboo, fronds, and some dull gray poles that could be
the bones of colossal sea-creatures.
Men and women were stationed behind the walls and several groups were out in the open. They were
armed with spears and bows and arrows.
Beyond the village were docks built of bamboo. Along them and on the shore were boats of various
builds and sizes. The floater's bot-tom was a dense tangle of thick roots. There were, however,
open-ings in it, and from several of these large stones at the ends of cables of vegetable matter
were dropped. The stones were white, gypsum- like, and carved into flat discs. They trailed in the
sea as they were dragged along by the island, then struck the land. The cables of some caught
under the docks.
Other anchors fell and struck against the walls of the village. They were snagged in the tangle of
stuff forming the high-piled walls. They bumped along the grassless ground and slammed into the
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摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Philip%20Jose%20Farmer/Philip%20Jose%20-%20World%20of%20Tiers%2002%20-%20The%20Gates%20of%20Creation.txtTHEGATESOFCREATIONPhilipJoseFarmerIThousandsofyearsago,thelordshaduseddrugs,electron­ics,hypno ism,andpsychotechniquestodowithoutsleep.Theirbod­iesstayedfreshandvigorous,theireyes...

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